by Hans Holzer
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” she said, “but it was very strange. The house was locked and empty. We know that. There could not have been a woman there. But several of the children insist they saw and heard her.
“It was shortly before eleven, opening time for the house, which dates back to 1765.
“When I came over to the children to explain they must wait for John Duffy, the second gardener, to unlock the doors at eleven,” Mrs. Campbell said, “one of the girls wanted to know why the tall woman who had come out on the balcony to reprimand them for boisterousness couldn’t let them in. There couldn’t have been any such woman—or anyone else—in the house.
“The woman the children described resembled Mme. Jumel, who some thought murdered her husband in the house in 1832, then married Aaron Burr the following year.
“But the children couldn’t know that, or what she looked like.
“They also couldn’t know that the balcony on which the apparition appeared separated Mme. Jumel’s and Burr’s bedrooms.”
Elizabeth Byrd was then working on a story about Manhattan ghosts for a magazine, so we decided to follow up this case together. First we contacted the public school authorities and obtained permission to talk to the children. The teacher assembled the entire group she had originally taken to the Jumel Mansion, and we questioned them, separately and together. Their story was unchanged. The woman appeared on the balcony, suddenly, and she told them to be quiet.
“How did she disappear?” I wanted to know.
One youngster thought for a moment, then said hesitantly, “She sort of glided back into the house.”
“Did you see the balcony doors open?” I asked the girl.
“No sir,” she replied firmly.
“Then did she glide through the door?”
“She did.”
The dress they described the ghost as wearing does exist—but it is put away carefully upstairs in the mansion and was not on display, nor is this common knowledge, especially among eleven-year-old school girls.
There was a cooking class in progress when we arrived, and the girls carefully offered us samples of their art. We declined for the moment and went on to see the curator of the mansion, Mrs. Campbell. This energetic lady takes care of the mansion for the Daughters of the American Revolution in whose charge the City of New York had placed the museum.
The Morris-Jumel Mansion—Washington Heights, New York
“Is this the first report of a haunting here?” I wanted to know.
Mrs. Campbell shook her head. “Here,” she said, and took down from one of the shelves in her office a heavy book. “William Henry Shelton’s work, The Jumel Mansion, pages 207 and 208 report earlier ghosts observed here.”
“Have you ever seen or heard anything?”
“No, not yet, but others have. There was that German nurse who lived here in 1865—she heard strange noises even then. Footsteps have been heard by many visitors here when there was no one about. The ghost of Mme. Jumel appeared to a retired guard at the door of this room.”
“How would you like me to investigate the matter?” I offered. A date was set immediately.
First, I thought it wise to familiarize myself with the physical layout of the historic house. I was immediately struck by its imposing appearance. Historian John Kent Tilton wrote:
Located on the highest elevation of Manhattan is one of the most famous old historic houses in the nation, the Morris-Jumel Mansion. The locality was originally called Harlem Heights by the Dutch in the days of New Amsterdam and was then changed to Mount Morris during the English ownership, before receiving the present name of Washington Heights.
The plot of land upon which the old mansion is situated was originally deeded in 1700 to a Dutch farmer named Jan Kiersen, from part of the “half morgen of land of the common woods” of New Haarlem.
Lieutenant Colonel Roger Morris purchased the estate in 1765. The new owner was born in England in 1728 and came to America at the age of eighteen with a commission of captaincy in the British army.
It was here that the Morris family, with their four children, spent their summers, living the domestic life typical of a British squire and family until the outbreak of the Revolution.
Colonel Morris fled to England at the beginning of hostilities, where he remained for two and one-half years.
As early in the war as August 1776, Mount Morris was taken over by the American troops and General Heath and staff were quartered there. After the disastrous Battle of Long Island, General Washington retreated to Haarlem Heights and made the place his headquarters. After Washington decided to abandon this location, the British moved in and the Morris Mansion housed General Sir Henry Clinton and his officers and, at intervals, the Hessians, during the seven years the British occupied New York.
During the following quarter of a century it was sold and resold several times and witnessed many changes in its varied career. Renamed Calumet Hall, it served for a time as a Tavern and was a stopping place for the stage coaches en route to Albany. It was the home of an unknown farmer when President Washington paid a visit to his old headquarters and entertained at dinner, among others, his cabinet members, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Knox, and their wives.
The locality was one that Stephen Jumel with his sprightly and ambitious wife delighted driving out to on a summer’s day from their home on Whitehall Street. Mme. Jumel became entranced with the nearby old Morris Mansion and persuaded her husband to purchase it for their home in 1810, for the sum of $10,000 which included 35 acres of land still remaining of the original tract.
The old house was fast falling into decay when Mme. Jumel energetically went about renovating and refurnishing it, and when completed, it was one of the most beautiful homes in the country. The Jumels restored the mansion in the style of the early nineteenth century, when the Federal influence was in fashion.
Mme. Jumel first married, some say by trickery, the rich Frenchman, Stephen Jumel. He had at one time owned a large plantation in Santo Domingo from whence he was obliged to flee at the time of the insurrection. Arriving in the United States, a comparatively poor man, he soon amassed a new fortune as a wine merchant, and at his death in 1832, his wife became one of the richest women in America. A year later she married Aaron Burr, former vice president of the United States. This second marriage, however, was of short duration and ended in divorce. Mme. Jumel died at the age of 93 in 1865.
The Morris-Jumel Mansion is of the mid-Georgian period of architecture. The front facade has four columns, two stories in height, with a pediment at the top.
The exterior is painted white. One of the post-colonial features added by the Jumels is the imposing front entrance doorway, with flanking sidelights and elliptical fanlight.
In the interior, the wide central hall with arches is furnished with late eighteenth and early nineteenth century pieces. At the left of the entrance is the small parlor or tea-room where the marriage ceremony of the Widow Jumel and Aaron Burr was performed in 1833 when the bride was fifty-eight and the groom twenty years her senior.
Across the hall is the stately Georgian dining room where many persons of fame assembled for elaborated dinner parties.
At the rear of the hall is the large octagonal drawing room.
The broad stairway leads to the spacious hall on the upper floor, which is furnished with personal belongings of the Jumels. There is a group portrait of Mme. Jumel and the young son and daughter of her adopted daughter, Mary Eliza, who married Nelson Chase.
The northwest bedroom contains furniture owned by the Jumels, including a carved four-poster bed.
In the old days the rooms on the third floor were probably used as extra guest chambers since the servants’ quarters were then located in the basement with the kitchen.
On January 19, 1964, a small group of people assembled in Betsy Jumel’s old sitting room upstairs. Present were a few members of the New York Historical Society and the Daughters of the American Revolution,
Journal-American writer Nat Adams, and a latecomer, Harry Altschuler of the World-Telegram. I was accompanied by Ethel Meyers, who had not been told where we were going that winter afternoon, and Jessyca Russell Gaver, who was serving us my secretary and doing a magazine article on our work at the same time.
We had barely arrived when Ethel went in and out of the Jumel bedroom as if someone were forcing her to do so. As she approached the room across the hall, her shoulder sagged and one arm hung loose as if her side and had been injured!
“I feel funny on my left side,” Ethel finally said, and her voice had already taken on some of the coloring of someone else’s voice.
We went back to the bedroom, which is normally closed to the public. One side is occupied by a huge carved four-poster, once the property of Napoleon I, and there are small chairs of the period in various spots throughout the room. In one corner, there is a large mirror.
“The issue is confused,” Ethel said, and sounded confused herself. “There is more than one disturbed person here. I almost feel as though three people were involved. There has been sickness and a change of heart. Someone got a raw deal.”
Suddenly, Ethel turned to one of the men who had sat down on Napoleon’s bed. “Someone wants you to get up from that bed,” she said, and evinced difficulty in speaking. As if bitten by a tarantula, the young man shot put from the bed. No ghost was going to goose him.
The haunted balcony
Ethel again struggled to her feet, despite my restraining touch on her arm. “I’ve got to go back to that other room again,” she mumbled, and off she went, with me trailing after her. She walked almost as if she were being taken over by an outside force. In front of the picture of Mme. Jumel, she suddenly fell to her knees.
“I never can go forward here...I fall whenever I’m near there.” She pointed at the large picture above her, and almost shouted, “My name isn’t on that picture. I want my name there!”
Mrs. Campbell, the curator, took me aside in agitation. “That’s very strange she should say that,” she remarked. “You see, her name really used to be on that picture a long time ago. But that picture wasn’t in this spot when Betsy Jumel was alive.”
I thanked her and led Ethel Meyers back to her chair in the other room.
“Henry...and a Johann...around her...,” she mumbled as she started to go into a deep trance. Hoarse sounds emanated from her lips. At first they were unintelligible. Gradually I was able to make them out. Halfway into a trance, she moved over to the bed and lay down on it. I placed my chair next to her head. The others strained to hear. There was an eerie silence about the room, interrupted only by the soft words of the entranced medium.
“You think me dead...” a harsh, male voice now said.
“No, I’ve come to talk to you, to help you,” I replied.
“Go away,” the ghostly voice said. “Go away!”
“Are you a man or a woman?” I asked.
Side view of the Morris-Jumel Mansion
A bitter laugh was the reply.
“Man...ha!” the voice finally said.
“What is your name?”
“Everybody knows who I am.”
“I don’t. What is your name?” I repeated.
“Let me sleep.”
“Is anything troubling you?”
There was a moment of silence, then the voice was a bit softer. “Who are you?”
“I’m a friend come to help you.”
“Nobody talks to me. They think I’m dead.”
“What exactly happened to you?”
“They took me away,” the voice said in plaintive tones. “I am not dead yet. Why did they take me away?”
Now the body of the medium shook as if in great agitation, while I spoke soothing words to calm the atmosphere. Suddenly, the ghost speaking through the medium was gone, and in his place was the crisp, matter-of-fact voice of Albert, Ethel’s control. I asked Albert to tell us through the entranced medium who the ghost was.
“I don’t hear a name, but I see a sturdy body and round face. He complains he was pronounced dead when he in fact wasn’t. I believe he is the owner of the house and it bears his name. There are many jealousies in this house. There is an artist who is also under suspicion.”
“Is there a woman here?”
“One thwarted of what she desired and who wants to throw herself out the window.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Thwarted in love and under suspicion.”
Later, I asked Mrs. Campbell about this. She thought for a moment, then confirmed the following facts: A young servant girl involved with one of the family tried to commit suicide by jumping out the window.
I questioned Albert further. “Is there a restless woman in this house?”
“That is right. The one in the picture. Her conscience disturbs her.”
“About what?”
The medium now grabbed her side, as if in pain. “I am being threatened,” Albert said now, “I feel the revelation would disturb.”
“But how can I release her unless I know what is holding her here?”
“It has to do with the death of her husband. That he was strangled in his coffin.”
I tried to question him further, but he cut us short. The medium had to be released now.
Soon, Ethel Meyers was back to her own self. She remembered very little of the trance, but her impressions of a clairvoyant nature continued for a while. I queried her about the person on the bed.
“I get the initial J.,” she replied and rubbed her side.
I turned to Mrs. Campbell. “What about the story of Mme. Jumel’s guilty conscience?”
“Well,” the curator replied, “after her husband’s death, she refused to live in this house for some time. She always felt guilty about it.”
We were standing in a corner where the medium could not hear us. “Stephen Jumel bled to death from a wound he had gotten in a carriage accident. Mme. Jumel allegedly tore off his bandage and let him die. That much we know.”
Mrs. Campbell naturally is a specialist on Betsy Jumel and her life, and she knows many intimate details unknown to the general public or even to researchers.
It was 5:30 in the afternoon when we left the house, which must be closed for the night after that hour.
* * *
The next morning two newspaper accounts appeared: One, fairly accurate, in the Journal, and a silly one in the Telegram, by a man who stood outside the room of the investigation and heard very little, if anything.
Several weeks went by and my ghost-hunting activities took me all over the country. Then I received a telephone call from Mrs. Campbell.
“Did you know that May twenty-second is the anniversary of Stephen Jumel’s death?” I didn’t and I wagered her nobody else did, except herself and the late Mr. Jumel. She allowed as to that and suggested we have another go at the case on that date. I have always felt that anniversaries are good times to solve murder cases so I readily agreed.
This time, the Journal and Telegram reporters weren’t invited, but the New York Times, in the person of reporter Grace Glueck, was, and I am indebted to her for the notes she took of the proceedings that warm May afternoon.
Present also were the general manager of King Features, Frank McLearn; Clark Kinnaird, literary critic of the Journal; John Allen and Bob O’Brien of Reader’s Digest; Emeline Paige, the editor of The Villager; writers Elizabeth Byrd and Beverly Balin; Ed Joyce of CBS; and several members of the New York Historical Society, presumably there as observers ready to rewrite history as needed since the famous Aaron Burr might be involved.
Ethel Meyers was told nothing about the significance of the date, nor had I discussed with her the results of the first séance.
Again we assembled in the upstairs bedroom and Ed Joyce set up his tape recorder in front of Napoleon’s bed, while Ethel sat on the bed itself and I next to her on a chair. To my left, the young lady from the Times took her seat. All in all there must have been twenty-five
anxious people in the room, straining to hear all that was said and keeping a respectful silence when asked to. Within a few minutes, Ethel was in a deep trance, and a male voice spoke through her vocal cords.
“Who are you?” I asked as I usually do when an unknown person comes through a medium.
“Je suis Stephen,” the voice said.
“Do you speak English?”
In answer the medium clutched at her body and groaned, “Doctor! Doctor! Where is the doctor?”
“What is hurting you?” I asked.
The voice was firm and defiant now. “I’m alive, I’m alive...don’t take me away.”
“Did you have an accident? What happened to you?”
“She tricked me.”
“Who tricked you?”
“I can’t breathe...where is she? She tricked me. Look at her!”
“Don’t worry about her,” I said. “She’s dead.”
“But I’m alive!” the entranced voice continued.
“In a sense, you are. But you have also passed over.”
“No—they put me in the grave when I was not yet dead.”
“How did you get hurt?” I wanted to know.
The ghost gave a bitter snort. “What matter—I’m dead. You said so.”
“I didn’t say you were dead.” I replied.
The voice became furious again. “She took it, she took it—that woman. She took my life. Go away.”
“I’m your friend.”
“I haven’t any friends...that Aaron....”
“Aaron? Was he involved in your death?”
“That strumpet...hold him! They buried me alive, I tell you.”
“When did this happen?”
“It was cold. She made me a fool, a fool!”
“How did she do that?”
“All the time I loved her, she tricked me.”
“I want to help you.”
“I’m bleeding.”
“How did this happen?”
“Pitchfork...wagon...hay....”
Painting of Madame Betsy Jumel at the house. She is still there…